The trick to paprika is precisely to cook it in fat or oil. That is the only way the flavour comes out of it. It is true that it turns bitter if you overcook it, so make sure you cook it in plenty of oil/fat and to not cook it for more than a minute. Sprinkling paprika on dishes is useless and so is adding it at the end to finish a dish. The only way to have your food taste of paprika is to cook the paprika in fat or oil.

The full name of this dish is gulyas leves, which literally means herder soup. Needless to say, this is not meant to be thick. You are meant to eat it with a spoon out of a bowl with no accompaniment whatsoever save for a slice of crusty bread if you must. Because it is quite a hearty soup, it is not used as an entree. Instead, it is followed by some kind of sweet dough to make it into a complete meal. In our family, it is most often followed by crepes, rolled up with your favorite jam inside or balls of dough that contain a whole plum, cherry or apricot inside, stone removed, and then rolled into breadcrumbs, served with a mix of confectioner’s sugar and ground cinnamon spooned over (basically a dumpling).

Many Hungarians add little bits of homemade noodles to this, although you could substitute any small soup pasta. The Hungarian way is nokedli, which is, once cooked, very similar to gnocchi, except it uses semolina in lieu of potatoes and the raw dough is softer. When the goulash is ready, you bring it to a boil and dump these little bits of dough in there to cook for just a few minutes. We use a typically Hungarian implement for this, called a nokedliszaggato, roughly noodle cutter in English. It looks like a frying pan, but it is entirely made of stainless steel and has holes all over the bottom. You place this on top of your cooking pot and put the ball of noodle dough in it, then vigourously scrape the bottom with a wooden spoon, which has the effect of dropping a bunch of irregularly shaped noodles into the pot. By the way, we also cook these in plain salted water to use much like pasta is used, occasionally dropping a few beaten eggs onto the resulting drained hot noodles and stirring to create a carbonara effect, which we serve with a simple salad of greens. Here is a link: http://pszichowellness-konyha.blogspot.com/2010/05/nokedli.html

These noodles are the traditional side dish to chicken paprikash, another Hungarian dish often abused by overly refined North American recipes.

Bon appetit!

I am also Hungarian, and I am not going to post yet another angry comment about this recipenot being a true goulash recipe (although indeed, it is not). But I do want to bring your attention to a point even Hungarians don’t seem to be aware of. The charm of authentic Hungarian cooking resides in its utter simplicity. Hungarian dishes are wholesome and tasty specifically because they aren’t refined. Many a Hungarian cook has never used a scale or measuring cup in their entire lives, their favorite cooking tool being their hands.

All this to say that, even though there is nothing wrong with innovating, people miss out on a lot by trying to refine centuries old recipes. Goulash has survived for so long because anybody can make it and as long as you keep it simple, you get the flavour right every time. The above recipe sure sounds great, but its complexity takes away from its truly awesome character. It is, after all, meant to be a simple peasant dish that herders would cook out in the open on twig fires (I think we can agree that herders weren’t into carrying a heavy bag full of ingredients).

Here is what you need to do to this dish to bring it much closer to the original dish. Don’t worry, it will not be any more unhealthy and it will only taste better. Please, trust simplicity, it can be a winner more than you know.

1. Remove the bacon, the garlic and the tomato paste.
2. Replace the vegetable oil with animal fat. Hungarians use pork fat (I believe Tenderflake would be it) which can be hard to find in North America, which is why I use duck fat. You could use bacon cooking juice, but then, revise the amount of salt used.
3. Please don’t use beer!
4. Replace the broth with water.
5. Please, don’t use vinegar! Of all the things that are wrong with this recipe if you want to call it goulash, this is the worst offender. You could use a few spoonfuls of red wine if you must, but no vinegar, I beg of you!
6. Instead of chopped bell peppers, use two bell peppers (the original calls for Hungarian Wax, by the way, which is close to Cubanel peppers if you want to try it), a tomato and an onion, halved, all of which you remove before serving. This would be the Hungarian equivalent of the carrot-celery-onion combination the French use in court bouillon.
7. Use chunkier beef, closer to one inch in size.

I urge you to try this. The combination of beef, caraway seeds, sweet paprika and the halved vegetables is what makes the taste of this dish, and not much else is needed. I consider that refining this dish destroys its character.